A 17-year-old from Sussex beat more than 3,500 students in a coding competition to win a trip to Google's headquarters in California.

Jude Birch, an A-Level Computer Science student at Varndean College, Brighton, was announced as one of the winners in Google’s annual Code-In competition.

A total of 3,555 students from 78 countries took part in the competition, with 16,468 tasks being completed with 25 open source organisations.

Jude chose to participate with Catrobat, a company which produces free educational apps for teenagers and children, and his task was to complete various assignments and create an educational game using Pocket Code.

Out of several hundred entrants aged between 13 and 17 years old, there were just five finalists and two winners.

Jude's entry has won him and a parent a trip to Google’s headquarters at Mountain View, California, next summer.

Jude, a former student of Priory School in Lewes, is studying A Levels at Varndean in Computer Science, Maths and Physics, as well as a BTEC Subsidiary Diploma in Computer Games Development. He hopes to follow a career in computer programming.